If I were to show you a photo of a random group of young people from the 1970s and then I were to show you a photo of a random group of young people from the 1980s, even if you ‘cleaned’ the images up according to modern photographic standards, it is very likely you will be able to tell which decade the photo was taken in.
The same goes for the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Fashions and styles altered so significantly between decades that the time that elapsed between them feel like generations. The distance between The Beatles and The Smiths, for example, feels like a lifetime.
Nowadays- and I don’t believe this to be merely a function of my moving into middle age- we see fashion and popular culture move more gradually and less seismically. We see this in football too, events endure less than they used to. I was 12 years old when Liverpool defeated Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle 4-3 at Anfield on Monday Night Football in April 1996.
A few months later, Oasis played two record breaking concerts at Knebworth, while England hosted Euro 96. All of this felt culturally seismic in a way that doesn’t really happen anymore due to the fragmentation of culture. Liverpool v Newcastle happened in a sweet spot where enough people had satellite television to watch the game but there wasn’t so much football on TV (or rival entertainment choices) that people would pass up the opportunity to see a big match during a heated title race.
It felt like everyone watched that game. Tony Yeboah’s volleys against Liverpool and Wimbledon earlier that season resonate nearly 30 years later in a way that goals and moments rarely do now due to saturation of coverage. When I was growing up watching Arsenal in the early 1990s, I had heard of Liam Brady, I was aware of Charlie Nicholas and I knew of the 1971 Double Winning Team.
But I had no visceral connection to them due to a lack of available footage. The only player who came close to bridging this divide was Charlie George, whose goal and nonchalant celebration for his winner in the 1971 FA Cup Final was part of the Arsenal cultural milieu. It was an iconographic image from an era that left few images.
All of this is a long way of saying that I had little to no connection to former greats. I had heard of Pele and seen two or three clips, I was aware of Johan Cruyff and had seen the famous Cruyff turn. I had seen Maradona’s brace against England in the 1986 World Cup. But the day to day brilliance of those players was, and still is, a mystery to me.
One of the great fortunes I have as an Arsenal fan, is that the famous ‘Invincible’ team that won two league titles and three FA Cups, came to the boil in my late teens and early 20s, the most impressionable age for a football fan. They also bloomed as I started to attend away games regularly.
Of Thierry Henry’s 377 Arsenal appearances, I think I was in the stadium for all but around 8-10 of them. My guilty admission is that I allowed his brilliance to wash over me. I watch the multiple compilations of his work and at a 20+ year remove, I cannot understand how I managed to normalise his superiority so easily.
What is especially interesting about Henry, however, is not my own relationship with his legend. It is the hold he continues to have on football players who would have been in nappies- maybe not even born- when he made his Arsenal debut in 1999. When Panama’s Cecilio Waterman scored a stoppage time winner for Panama against the USA recently, Henry was working on the game as a pundit for CBS Sports.
Waterman ran behind the goal where Henry was sat and screamed, ‘you are my idol!’ in his face as he celebrated the crowning moment of his career. When Frankfurt’s Hugo Ekitite scored against Spurs recently and celebrated with a knee slide, some sites compared his celebration to Thierry Henry’s famous- and now bronze preserved- celebration against the same opponent.
Ekitite happily shared the mock up pictures on his Instagram stories. Ekitite was 12 when Henry retired from playing and was four months old when Henry executed that celebration in the North London derby. So why does Henry’s ‘aura’ in modern parlance persist so?
Well, clearly, as I covered earlier in the piece, the footage is available from Henry’s playing days. A lot from the early 2000s resonates as global TV packages were becoming more widely available and the Champions League in particular, was available to watch worldwide.
It stands to reason that today’s professional players will have grown up being able to watch Henry, who was a Champions League regular and a regular at international tournaments with an iconic France team. He played in two World Cup Finals, a European Championship Final and two Champions League Finals.
Clearly, there was not just a quality to Henry that made him such an enjoyable player but a brooding, almost cartoonishly French personality that underpinned it. He had the swagger and arrogance of a rock ‘n’ roll frontman. His sloped shoulders and stony-faced expressions, somehow equally expressionless and worthy of a thousand words, suggested a sort of unspoken disdain for his opponent.
Without wishing to make this too homoerotic, he was tall, athletic and good looking, his hair and stubble tightly cropped. Crucially, even now 10 years after his retirement, he has barely aged a day and he certainly looks like he enjoys the benefits of a home gymnasium. He looks as though he could still play.
That agelessness is a small part of his appeal, to look at him now is not much different to looking at the 2003 prototype. In August 2002, I recall Birmingham City defender Michael Johnson appearing on Sky Sports’ highlights show ‘Goals on Sunday’ the day after playing against Henry.
‘If you were building a centre-forward in a lab’, Johnson marveled, ‘you would build him exactly like Henry.’ Immediately breaking my promise not to make this piece too homoerotic, I would also suggest if you were building a suave middle-aged man to sell tightly fitting suits and designer watches, you would probably build him exactly like Henry too. He rivals David Beckham in the smoldering DILF stakes.
Every generation thinks that the footballers from their youth had more personality than today’s equivalents. I don’t believe that to be literally true; but I do believe some players were more able or willing to display their personalities a generation ago. I do not blame today’s footballers for this at all.
Martin Odegaard basically set the internet on fire for a week last season because he took a photograph with Stuart MacFarlane’s camera on the pitch. Celebrating any sort of achievement that isn’t literally the World Cup or Champions League final winning goal is met with tedious discourse by the most boring people in the world. Honestly, why would you bother to be demonstrative in that climate?
Henry, much like his contemporary Ronaldinho, probably belongs to the class of footballer whose craft was honed by the environment of their youth. Henry often talks about his refusal to celebrate goals as a hangover from his childhood when his father would be ultra critical of his efforts. Ronaldinho’s father died in a tragic accident when he was a teenager.
Both players carry the (differing) pains of their upbringing with them and molded them into a form of expression. Henry carried the scars of his father’s harsh gaze, Ronaldinho was a Peter Pan character who ‘never grew up’ since his older siblings took control of his life and his career so that Ronaldinho could concentrate on being really bloody good at football.
Henry had a sense of expressionism and artistry that we probably do see less of nowadays due to a mixture of more refined coaching and a harsher external climate. Thierry also played in the US and played well for New York Redbulls, which has likely cemented his appeal in the sport’s most significant growth area.
The man’s refusal to age as well as his inherent, well, sexiness have preserved some of that appeal in amber. It’s not that there weren’t other incredible players in that era either, Kaka was a force of nature at AC Milan. He was just a little more clean cut and a little less interesting.
Henry had an insouciance and a ‘tekkers’ that make him a compilation makers dream. Ultimately, this has made him memeable in the way old Simpsons clips are and it is why his appeal has endured, even with those whose contemporary memories of him are remote.
